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The Economist & me

For 20 years, between 1997 and 2017, I wrote for The Economist and its sister publications. That comes to more than a thousand stories.

You may have read my articles without knowing they were by me, because The Economist doesn’t have bylines. Here is just a tiny sample of some stories over the years that I’ve especially enjoyed writing.

How an artist and many private citizens remember holocaust victims with Stolpersteine, little brass plates in the public sidewalk of Berlin and other cities, and how those stones form new human connections.

This is my favorite story ever. Why are the poor and down-trodden Filipina maids in Hong Kong cheerful and apparently happy, when their rich and successful Chinese employers are reliably miserable and cranky? Lessons for all of us!

Written in the thick of the euro crisis, this is meant to be a cheeky historical comparison between the European Union and the Holy Roman Empire. The parallels really are quite striking, and may offer lessons.

Here I’m profiling a family of Mexicans who came — illegally — to work in California’s fields. I compare them with the Okies that John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath. Why did they come? Does that reason make it right?

This one won an award. It looks at how technology changes the media and society, from Gutenberg to blogs, podcasts, wikis and so forth. Includes a few podcasts we did, which happen to be The Economist‘s first ever!